Been a week of slow progress and small disappointments.
Take today. IT was dumping some old Mac Mini's, and I snagged one. Was thinking of setting it up for recording at the shop (so I can play trumpet parts without my neighbors screaming at me.) Had some company stuff on it. No problem, says Apple. Erase the hard disk, it will boot up from the restore sector and you can download the factory original OS right off the net.
Except no. Turns out Apple was either lying, have changed it, or were incomplete about it. But that took an hour or two of pressing buttons and hoping that it would actually work this time. So now I have a brick, and a copy of Lion on order just in case I feel up for making a boot disk for it.
My laptop has been running hot. Hot enough so it automatically cranks down the CPU cycles, which causes videos to stutter and CPU-intense applications like 3D stuff to get, well, ugly. That actually took a while to figure out. The same IT dump included a broken cooling pad so that got me thinking I should just order one of those.
Amazon lost the order. While it was wandering around the boondocks I thought a little harder and finally dug into it and opening up the laptop to clean out the vents and re-do the thermal paste turns out to not be quite as scary as I thought. But needs some special tools. So I ordered those.
And got to thinking about that. If I'm opening it up, why not replace the ailing optical drive, increase the RAM to maximum, and even put in an SSD?
I got inspired enough I opened it up anyhow and blew out some of the dust. And then the cooling pad arrived anyhow so I'm using that for now.
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And then there's software. Carrara no longer ran after the last OS "upgrade" and I had enough problems with it already. So I'd purchased Cheetah3D and that was good enough to knock off the calyx model I needed for the last cover.
The next model should have been simple. This was the section of Underground platform I needed for the next book cover. But it was a freaking pain to do in Cheetah. The UVmapper is not wonderful, there's no polygon groups (at least, not accessible), it can't manage to keep scale constant (I brought a model back out of the render to tweak, and it got thrown into a different scale and position the moment it had been opened by Cheetah.) And the poly tools -- well they basically don't exist. The thing is barely functional as a prims modeler and is useless for polys.
Well, fine. This time I'm finally going to learn Blender.
Oh, yeah. And while I was too sick and stupid to work on the novel over last weekend (and part of the week) I was messing around with Fallout 4. I've basically stopped playing the game. I think I spent as much time in console mode as out. "Player.additem" and "tcl" and the like are right at my fingertips.
More software skills learned at some expense and like as not never to be used again.
Yesterday was all about making the busted UVmap Cheetah crapped out actually work. And then being very annoyed by the behavior of the Paths tool in PhotoShop...why? Because part of Leslie Green's look was a distinctive serif font that is apparently quite recognizable. There is a commercial font "inspired" by it, called Beeching, but several of the characters are clearly wrong and the serifs are the wrong shape and for twenty bucks...!
So I hand-edited Baskerville and it is close enough. Gives me even more respect for the art of font, with how to mix the thins and the thicks for grace and readability and all that other stuff I didn't actually do. I pretty much made a dog's breakfast of it but I'm using it anyhow.
Now I just have to add in the drips and broken tiles and the proper oxblood and so on. Plus displacement and spec maps and you know the drill.
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And create the other graphics. I'm willing to put it out with a mock-up cover just as long as I'm printing author's copies for the beta readers. Because I really want my dad checking on the Britishisms and especially the Geordie. Because that's exactly the sort of thing he likes doing.
As I go through pass after pass, cleaning up and tightening, each pass I take out more of the Geordie and make it more obvious what they are saying. I was editing the first pub scene, though, just before I stopped to blog, and that turned out to be very annoying since I could either have Liam speaking Geordie or contributing. Which was only part of the picture; the characters in this scene aren't coming across as distinct voices. I realized I could swap lines around, they were that generic. And that's not good.
I've also been taking a lot of notes about ways I want to go through and bring the main plot lines out and make them more obvious. One of them being the "dun dun duuun!" pass; the one where I have the story (if not Penny herself) recognize that An Adventure Has Just Begun.
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And one other rescue from IT's pile works fine; that's a 3 TB external drive. Which again slipped through their clutches with all the data intact and I just got done erasing it.
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